Microsoft and IDE builds

[Steven Knight]

Conspirators--

Can someone suggest a good resource or reference (print or on-line) for
the build portions of Microsoft Visual Studio (or C++)? And/or other
integrated development environments, perhaps?

After the recent mailing list discussion about how well Cons does or
does not support Windows (by which I presume we really mean Visual
Studio), I thought I'd try to educate myself about that environment,
to see if that can help with future Cons development.  A quick leafing
through various VC++ books at the local Border's didn't turn up much.
They seemed to devote very few pages to build issues, which is probably
reasonable if most people are content to just build software the way
Microsoft wants them to.

Any suggestions for good reading on how MSV[CS] handle software builds,
and how other tools such as Cons do or do not fit into that?

        --SK